spring 2011 Courses

For the entry-level student. Explores the fundamental elements of music—form, harmony, melody, pitch, rhythm, texture, timbre—and teaches basic skills in reading and writing Western music notation for the purposes of reading, analyzing, and creating musical works.

A study of avian and human melodies, including the mechanics, anatomy, neurobiology, and endocrinology of sound production and recognition in birds and humans; ecological, geographical, and evolutionary contexts of song; and interspecific influences on songs. Songs and calls, identified aurally and through basic music notation, are used to inspire new musical compositions that explore the musical relationships between humans and birds. Requires field trips and anatomy laboratories; no music or biology experience is required or presumed.

Explores the history of audio recording technology as it pertains to music, aesthetic function of recording technique, modern applications of multitrack recording, and digital editing of sound created and captured in the acoustic arena. Topics include the physics of sound, microphone design and function, audio mixing console topology, dynamic and modulation audio processors, studio design and construction, principles of analog to digital (ADA) conversion, and artistic choice as an engineer. Students will create their own mix of music recorded during class time.

An introduction to various Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean musical forms and some of the issues and debates that surround them. Students examine case studies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Some central themes include similarities and differences in black identity across the Americas, the relative importance of African retentions and New World innovations in the formation of these musical forms, the nature of cultural mixture with indigenous and European forms, the role of music in black religion, and musical dialogues between differently located black populations in the Americas.

Tenor sax jazz icons John Coltrane (1926–1967) and Sonny Rollins (b. 1930) had much in common: similar musical trajectories from bebop through almost all of jazz’s developments during their lifetimes; early and lasting fame as belonging to the most important figures in American music; and deep personal humility combined with searching spirituality. But the contrasts are equally strong, especially in their approach to composition, improvisation, and performance. Follows their careers and their positions in American music and its broader context from the 1950s to the present.

Focuses on the ways black people have experienced twentieth-century events. Examines social, economic, and political catalysts for processes of protest music production across genres including gospel, blues, folk, soul, funk, rock, reggae, and rap. Analysis of musical and extra-musical elements' style, form, production, lyrics, intent, reception, commodification, mass-media, and the Internet. Explores ways in which people experience, identify, and propose solutions to poverty, segregation, oppressive working conditions, incarceration, sexual exploitation, violence, and war.

For some 400 years Shakespeare‚s texts have been a mother lode for composers. This course will consider a range of compositions on Shakespeare from the early 19th century to the present in songs, instrumental music and theater works (opera, ballet, musicals), considering the musical versions‚ treatment of Shakespeare‚s themes and plots, narrative arc and shape, characterization, and so on. Texts may include short lyrics, A Midsummer Night‚s Dream, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew. Composers may include Virgil Thomson, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten, Giuseppe Verdi, Hector Berlioz, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Leonard Bernstein, Thomas Adès, Ned Rorem, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter.

An introduction to the art of combining the elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, and orchestration to create cohesive and engaging music. Students learn techniques for generating and developing musical ideas through exercises and four main compositional assignments: a work for solo instrument, a theme and variations for solo instrument and piano, a song for voice and piano, and a multi-movement work for three to five instruments. Students also learn ways to discuss and critique their own and one another’s work. Ends with a concert of student compositions.

A compositional study of polyphonic part-writing styles from the Renaissance through the Baroque era. In addition to writing short exercises and building aural and keyboard skills, students will also compose three pieces: a Renaissance-style motet, and a Baroque-style invention and fugue.

Traces histories of the political economy of music. Examines the politics, economics, ethics, and senses of belonging that accompany global and transcultural networks of musical exchange along paths of conquest, commerce, religion, and technological change. Case studies may include Orientalist operas, colonial African and Asian brass bands, music and pilgrimage, African musics in seventeenth-century Portugal, Scottish music in Meiji Japan, karaoke in the Vietnamese diaspora, music in Second Life, crooners and the massification of intimacy, the ethics of world music sampling, questions of agency and homogenization in the culture industry, the economics of file sharing, and sound as property in copyright law from the player piano to the Wacky Quacker soundmark case.